I’m spending a lot of time with Affinity Photo these last few weeks – originally looking at how to improve my portrait photos on the iPhone, but now looking at trees and buildings. I’m experimenting with methods of isolation – removing the subject from the foreground and placing it on a complementary, neutral background. It’s trickier than it seems, particularly when it comes to trees and plants – the complexity is immense. I’ve been working on selection refinement and feathering as ways to reduce complexity and to allow the subject to sit well with it’s background with no jagged edges.

Here’s a selection of photos I’ve been working with. I took all of them over a single hour last week in Castlemartyr Resort in Ireland, and I’ve since been working on extracting them from their backgrounds. Castlemartyr Resort has some stunning trees for me to work on.

A few days ago, I shared this photo of a Zeppelin that passed us by when I was on Lake Constance.

It was part of an iPhone burst, so I had the idea to create an animated gif file of the experience. This was a little trickier than expected however, because I was on a boat at the time, so the degree of shake was pretty serious!

I took 22 shots from the burst and, patiently working with Affinity Photo, I stabilised them as much as I could. Here’s the result.

Just in case you are asking – the two small dots in front of the Zeppelin is a plane carrying an advertising banner.